


Dethroned

by inkedinserendipity



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Please heed warnings!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-21
Updated: 2020-01-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:34:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22342663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkedinserendipity/pseuds/inkedinserendipity
Summary: Martin considers the cracked glasses, for a moment. Remembers how they sat on a sharp nose, curved against a sharp face, framed bright green eyes that softened so gently for him, and hurts.He leans back and throws them, as far and hard as he can.Both of them watch as they arc, far and up in the sky, and do not see where they land.
Relationships: Jonathan Sims & Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 35
Kudos: 239





	Dethroned

**Author's Note:**

> I got to listening by [My Friends by Oh Wonder](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ypofGDdHpo), and this is what happened. Please heed the warnings: there's a softer ending, but this is not a happy fic. 
> 
> Set in a world where the Watcher's Crown was undone, but at a price.

Later, much later, Martin will be the one to name the ritual that saved the world. 

It will not be in the day that follows. It will not be in the week, the month, not even the year after. His poetry has run dry.

* * *

Daisy doesn’t handle anything larger than a bread knife. It isn’t that she doesn’t trust herself, except that it is; there is no decisive action to free her from the Hunt, not as Melanie severed her tie to the Eye by blinding herself. No; the Hunt thrives on the chase, and when Daisy swore to never hurt another living thing with her fists or her knives or her guns, the Hunt let her be, but it is not gone, not for good. The moment she slips up, she will be taken. A chase that does not end. She does not like the feeling of being, not a predator, but its prey.

Daisy takes to layering her toast: first butter, then jam. Not for the taste, but for the solid weight of the knife in her hand. Her butter knife was a gift from Martin, carefully weighted to feel…functional. Firm. She doesn’t know how he got it. She doesn’t ask. 

Recently he gave that day a name: _The Day of the Dethroned_. Dramatic, she thinks, but will reluctantly admit that it suits. She hopes he’s writing poetry again. It would do him good, she thinks.

She knows that he is not.

* * *

Martin tried visiting Melanie and Georgie, a couple of times. Wanted to keep himself from becoming lonely. Thought seeing some old friends might help. And to their credit, they welcomed him as a friend; even traded stories, for a while. But they’d never had much in common.

He left feeling lonelier than when he’d arrived. He doesn’t blame them. There’s not much they could have done.

It is not the number of people around that makes one lonely, Martin knows; it is their connections, or the lack thereof. And after the Day, Martin is connected with very few people indeed. Melanie and Georgie have each other, though even that is tenuous now; he hasn’t heard from Basira in months; and Daisy….

Well. Sometimes they get lunch. He knows how hard it is to leave an Entity behind, especially ones – like theirs – that never truly leave their lost children in peace. He gives her a butter knife, weighted for cutting, a blunt-edged thing that feels as though it could do damage while remaining harmless as a spoon. The week after he gave her that gift, she returned with a tartan quilt.

He’d recognized it immediately, of course. He doesn’t know when she last visited her own safehouse, but he knows the blanket well, from the nights spent huddled beneath it with – 

– with a fire blazing in the hearth in front of him. 

He wraps himself in that tartan quilt, hoping it will warm him, but as he stares dully at the wall of his sitting room, devoid of hearth and heat, a slight and familiar chill winds around his ankles. He cannot bring himself to kick it away. 

* * *

Daisy doesn’t know what brings her to Martin’s flat, not properly. He’d written down his address once, and handed it to her with a smile that he could never quite wrangle into fullness, and he’d meant it, she thinks, when he’d told her that she was always welcome.

Her old scars ache. The gashes on her face, once more inconvenience than pain, smart all the way from temple to cheek. She has a butter knife in her back pocket, and the hairs on the back of her neck are nearly always prickling, and she feels ridiculous for it. 

She knocks.

Minutes pass. They feel disbelieving. Then the door opens. Martin looks wan, and pale. Daisy wouldn’t expect anything else.

He doesn’t say anything; she doesn’t either. They don’t have to. He steps back, and she follows. He makes tea, and she drinks it. Adds more sugar, and is glad to see him making a note of it, that her preferences have changed. 

She never met the old Martin, the one Jon talked about so much, after the Unknowing and the Buried, before the end of the world. But she knows he was kind, and cared a lot about little things like this; like how people take their tea, and how they look when they are breaking. That Martin has not been around for a very, very long time. 

It is nice. To see a little bit of him peeking through.

* * *

Martin’s not sure what draws him and Daisy together, again and again. He’s certainly not good company these days. Outside their flats, the whole world is rousing again, with the wary slowness of a flock whose nest was overturned by some vicious predator, then set right again by a gentler hand – stung, fearful; but with a cautious, worried hope. 

Martin’s not found much use for hope. He doesn’t partake when he hears all of London carousing a defiance to the sky that was once illuminated through with the Watcher. He prefers to keep to himself. 

Daisy doesn’t bother with the celebrations either. More and more often these days, the evenings find them sat quietly on the couch in Martin’s sitting room, ankles twined around with an old tartan quilt, sipping on tea made with a careful hand.

Daisy takes hers with more sugar than she used to, Martin noticed. That feels important. Heavy. Weighted, in a way that nothing has for a long, long time.

* * *

It has been eighteen months to the Day when Daisy speaks his name. 

Martin doesn’t expect that it will hurt. It’s been hard to feel anything at all lately, and he used to attribute that to the chill winding around his ankles, until Daisy pointed out that it was psychosomatic, and now Martin thinks that the explanation for his flatness might be much more mundane. Daisy suggested a therapist. So did Melanie – thoughtful of her. She has some recommendations. Martin hasn’t bothered.

It _hurts_. 

Like a knife to the chest, twisted just left of center. Like a rib torn from its cage. Like an ache, just where his heart should be. 

“Don’t,” Martin snaps, and he means it to be sharp, harsh, but it is a desperate plea. “Daisy – don’t.”

“You’re lonely, Martin,” Daisy says, unruffled. “Lowercase L, sure. But even still.”

“There’s nothing I can do about that.” 

“Stupid,” Daisy says, in that no-nonsense way of hers. For a wild moment Martin wonders if she chose words as her weapon of choice after physical avenues were torn from her, if this is how she hunts now, before shoving all that aside. Of course not. She is dripping with worry and sincerity. “There’s always a path forward, you’ve just got to take it. It takes courage, and a hell of a lot of strength, but it has to be done, and it _can._ You know that. Jon did too.”

_“Please.”_

“I’ll not sit here and watch you waste away, Martin Blackwood.” 

“You don’t have much of a choice.”

She laughs. She actually laughs. And that – that stings too. “You don’t scare me, Martin. I know fear, and you’re not it.”

Daisy sleeps in his flat that night, on the couch, beneath her old quilt. Martin doesn’t sleep much at all, but in all fairness, he doubts Daisy does either. His chest aches the whole, long, stretching night, echoing with a name he hasn’t spoken for a year and a half to this day.

* * *

He looks up one of the therapists Melanie recommended. Sees that they specialize in depression, concentrate on family issues. He closes the tab as though he’d been burned.

* * *

“Martin,” Daisy says, nearly a week later, holding a box of jasmine tea. She turns the label toward him. “When did you buy this?” 

Martin’s mouth falls flat. “Don’t remember,” he lies.

“Martin.”

 _“Daisy,”_ he parrots, losing patience quickly, so quickly. 

“I was a detective, Martin, and you’re not good at lying.” 

“I deceived the avatars of multiple fear gods.”

“Hiding and lying aren’t the same thing.” Daisy gives the box a little shake. “How long ago, Martin?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Daisy sighs. “I drink earl grey,” she says, “and you drink chamomile. I think you always have. This was Jon’s favorite.”

“Shut up.”

“Throw it away, Martin.”

“No.”

“It’s not doing him much good here.”

“I won’t – ” He snatches for it. She lets him take it. “I won’t. I _won’t_. It doesn’t fucking matter when I _bought_ it, Daisy, I’m not getting rid of it.”

“It won’t bring him back. Nothing will. He’s dead, Martin.”

“Get out.”

“Martin – ”

“Out,” he snaps, blindingly, awfully, overwhelmingly furious. Daisy takes a step back from him. “Get _out_.” 

“Okay,” she says, hands raised, as if confronting something vicious. In the darkest parts of him Martin finds that horribly funny. “Okay.” 

She turns and goes.

* * *

He folds up the tartan quilt, and puts the box of tea in the little nest the fabric makes. He stares at it for a long, long time. A psychosomatic chill, like fog, winds around his ankles. It hovers as he watches, for nothing at all, then recedes like the tide. 

The lighter is next. The webs have dug so deep into the metal that they look like cracks in stone. Martin digs it out from his closet, places it gently, so gently, next to the box of tea, and studies that too.

Then the cracked pair of glasses, hidden like a treasure in the corner of Martin’s closet. The jumper that has always been far too small for Martin but that still smells, desperately faint, like woodsmoke, and ink, and jasmine flowers. The jar of ashes. The scarf of pashmina wool, patterned with a stitch of tan and green. He gathers these things up slowly, deliberately, and places them on the quilt, and folds them all up, and does not touch them for months.

* * *

The knock on Martin’s door startles him, mostly because it is familiar. It has been a very long time since he has heard a friendly knock on his door.

He peers through the peephole in his door. It’s Daisy, of course. There is no one else it could have been.

He opens the door. She steps inside. He hadn’t expected to see her, but then again he is not surprised. 

And now is as good a time as any.

“I’m going to burn your quilt,” he says, coming to a resolution then and there. “Sorry about that.”

“Oh,” she says, surprised. “No, please do.”

They make something of a sorry pair; both of their voices are hoarse and scratched with disuse. Daisy looks at him, and smiles, real. It’s lopsided, tugged down and falling off at the edges; but the smile Martin gives her in return is just as genuine, just as rusted over and a little bit miserable. 

Daisy reaches out her hand. Martin stares for a heartbeat, for two. Her forefinger is extended.

He twines their fingers together, as he used to see her and Jon do, in the weeks before the Day of the Dethroned. And all at once Daisy crumples, her other hand clenched over her face, and Martin pulls her to his chest, and murmurs nothing at all as she cries.

* * *

It isn’t much of a funeral pyre, this ragged pile of items that used to belong to the man who dethroned the Watcher. It isn’t much of a procession either; thousands of people clamored for Martin’s attention, for Daisy’s, for Basira’s and Georgie’s and Melanie’s, to pay their thanks and respect to them and to the man who saved the world, but there are only two that watch as these few memories of him wisp up into smoke. It is a smoke that drifts, curling faintly, up into the sky, before disappearing. 

Their hands are twined together. He is not the person Daisy needs at her side, but that is all right, and they take solace in it. Daisy is not the person he needs most either, but neither of them can get him back. 

“Got a therapist,” Daisy remarks, eventually, after the strange black smoke that curled up from the remnants of the scarf and quilt and jumper and teabags all disappear. “Name’s Sandy. Real charmer.”

“Hmm.”

“Nice office. Close to here.” 

There’s an object left in the grass, he notices, suddenly. A pair of glasses, the frames cracked through and clouded with smoke, just sticking up from the stems. Glasses aren’t flammable. It’s mere feet away from them. Martin steps forward, tugging Daisy along with him, and picks them up. They’re hot. 

He considers them, for a moment. Remembers how they sat on a sharp nose, curved against a sharp face, framed bright green eyes that softened so gently for him, and _hurts_. 

He leans back and throws them, as far and hard as he can. 

Both of them watch as they arc, far and up in the sky, and do not see where they land. 

“Think it’s about time I got out of here anyway,” Martin says, eventually. He manages a little smile, then elbows her in the ribs. “You know, I’ve not been to your place once. Poor hospitality, that’s what that is.”

* * *

Daisy’s place is a small little flat east of central London. Modest, and utterly devoid of knives.

She makes Martin chamomile tea, just the way he likes it. Steam wisps up from their mugs. No words pass between them as they sit, knees brushing on the couch, but then again there’s not much left to be said. 

* * *

He doesn’t meet Sandy, but he does meet Charlene, a lovely woman with curly brown hair and a pair of spectacles far too small for her eyes. He agrees to meet her because she specializes in depression, and family matters too. 

He keeps coming because, although she recognizes him – of course she does, he is The One Who Walked Alone – she lets him be the first to speak Jon’s name. 

* * *

He picks up poetry again, at Charlene’s insistence. 

Daisy’s taken up sudoku. She’s also stolen, and subsequently lost, most of Martin’s pencils. He’s taken to hiding his good pens between the couch cushions. She knows where he’s hidden them, of course, but pretends she doesn’t know. They keep up their little pretense, because it’s harmless, and funny, in a distant and childlike sort of way. 

The first poem Martin writes is a short little thing. He’s not sure if it counts as a poem, not really, since it’s all of one line, but it took him two hours to piece together words that _felt_ right. 

The title is simple, and shorter still: _Jonathan Sims._

For the first time in two long, long years, he cries. And Daisy, her sudoku book discarded, his lone paper set carefully aside, pulls him gently to her chest, and murmurs nothing at all as he cries. 

**Author's Note:**

> Cross-posted from the original at [tumblr](http://inkedinserendipity.tumblr.com).


End file.
